There won’t be an orange baseball bat knocking around Capitol Hill any time soon — or at least, Carl Paladino won’t be wielding it.
Paladino will not be running for Congress in the special election for New York’s 26th District, his home district. Republican Congressman Chris Lee resigned yesterday after a report in Gawker that the married politician had been seeking dates on Craigslist while falsely representing himself as a divorced lobbyist, and sending photos of himself sans shirt, in order to demonstrate that he was a “fun fit classy guy.”
Paladino made headlines in 2010, as the Republican nominee for governor. Democrat Andrew Cuomo won the race statewide by a landslide margin of 61%-34% — but not in this district. In fact, Paladino won double-digit victories in all but two of the counties that include this district.
Paladino told the New York Times: “I’m not a compromising type of a person.”
He also didn’t seem to even like the fact that people were asking him to run: “Would a real friend urge me to run?”
Paladino, a businessman who won the Republican primary in an upset against establishment-backed former Congressman Rick Lazio, was without a doubt one of the outrageous breakout pols of last year. Paladino had his fair share of wacky moments during that campaign — starting with when he got in trouble for forwarding racist and pornographic emails.
He nearly came to blows with New York Post state editor Fred Dicker over news coverage of Paladino’s out-of-wedlock daughter, with Paladino accusing Dicker of sending photographers after her. “You send another goon to my daughter’s house, and I’ll take you out, buddy!” Paladino yelled.
But the matter of Paladino’s own daughter didn’t prevent him from making moral attacks on Cuomo. He claimed (though never proved) Cuomo had been having an affair. And he attacked Cuomo for going to a gay pride parade with his children, saying he doesn’t want his kids to be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or successful option. It isn’t.”
Also on the subject of women, Paladino attacked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was running in a special election to complete Hillary Clinton’s term, as being senior Senator Chuck Schumer’s “little girl.”
And when he lost, Paladino famously brandished a baseball bat during his concession speech: “Make no mistake, you have not heard the last of Carl Paladino.”
